Yesterday, I noticed a box of plasticine at a local supermarket. Nice, big, colored chunks, that reminded me of the palette of a certain game...so I made an impulse purchase, and tried to model a simplified cacodemon:

and this is how it would look with Doom's resolution and palette:

I haven't modeled anything in clay or plasticine for years, and this is just a rough approximation of a cacodemon (it has however a bumped surface and various orifices ;-) but I think that this sort of modeling has some potential. Next time I will try with humanoid figures, although I'll probably need some more refined techniques like wire/toothpick skeletons and perhaps accessories.

If there's enough interest (and as soon as I can find my camera's tripod and set up a "photo studio" to use for rotations and chroma-keyed badkground), I will make a small sprite PWAD out of it to see how it'd work out.

Hey I literally threw this together in 5 minutes (well, at least after I figured out the best way to carve the "teeth") without any reference but memory. For the sprite experiment I'll use a pic of the actual sprite and add more detail.

Hey, this is a pretty badass idea man. But that reminds me...my daughter has a huge box of Play-Doh containers (one of those party packs) that has never really been opened...maybe I could use that to model some monsters too. I never thought about it before; I always used Poser 4 to make things like this...

And go ahead and take 16 angled rotation pictures if you want to, since ZDoom supports it.

Many times I've wished that ID would have gone ahead and saved more angles and higher resolution pictures and maybe included them as a "High-res" mode in the original game. Or saved them for use in source ports (ha).

I tried to follow the id model closer this time, with some artistic licenses to make it more suitable to work with at this scale. Even though the monster looks a simple round ball, it's full of protrusions and tiny details like horns, lobes, glands, orifices and pseudopoda, not to mention those damn teeth. This makes handling it awkard, and the model fragile :-(

Anyway, I believe plasticine gives it an organic quality that's lacking from the original, and is even preserved at Doom's resolution. It's the first time I found the cacodemon actually disgusting ;-)

Anyway, it's late, I'll do attack animations tomorrow. If positive input continues, I'll extend an invitation for some assistance (there's a some palette and scale adaptation work to do before these can be turned into useful sprites).

I was wondering about that...directly damaging the model will of course be more satisfying, but it's a one-way road, so I can't reuse it for anything else afterwards, save scrapping its plasticine for another use. Cheating and using image editing is another possibility. Or probably both.

I'm in no way an expert in clay animation, and there are aspects of it that I am not very adept at, like e.g. the proper way to photograph the model, what postprocessing to apply, how to keep coloring/lighting even between different postures etc.

As of now, I take pics at 640*480 resolution (makes them easier to process, with IMO the right amount of detail for the final use), with strobe enabled, against a cardboard background, and manually extrude the wanted portions with PSP.

To hold the cacodemon, since it's too flimsy to "sit" on a pedestal, I impaled it on a pen (!) and rotated it by hand. Biped monsters with a skeleton may actually be easier to handle.

I plan to use this to make new monsters with less effort than drawing them or modeling them in 3D (at least for me). I chose the caco as a first effort because it looked easy enough. Of course any project requiring new sprites can use this method, the only issue is if making exact (or close) replicas of Doom's monsters would be acceptable as a free resource.

jute said:For FreeDoom, I meant an original design, made in this style. A close match to an original Doom monster wouldn't be accepted.

I honestly don't think that should be a problem in the case of the cacodemon. id Software modeled directly after the beholder of Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn was named after the greek cacodaemon.

Ultimately it is up to the Freedoom crew to decide what is acceptable anyway.